Images

Wikis Take Manhattan is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest aimed at illustrating Wikipedia and StreetsWiki articles covering sites and street features in Manhattan and across the five boroughs of New York City.

We Have Band, and electro-pop act from London, recently released a great new video for their single You Came Out in collaboration with creative agency Wieden + Kennedy. The video is stop frame animated and composed of 4,816 still images, all of which are CC BY-SA licensed and available on We Have Band’s flickr page. This allows fans of the band the ability to reanimate the video and reuse the images as long as they attribute We Have Band and share derivative works under the same license.

All sorts of interesting things show up in our Twitter search feed, and yesterday we were thrilled to come across Cadyou via @sketchupshop. Cadyou is a community launched by Tom Moor in late 2008 whose goal is to create a resource of free, high quality files for everyone to use, available in the Public Domain and under Creative Commons licenses. One interesting component of Cadyou’s content is its moderation policy:

Unlike many websites which let user upload their own content, cadyou is moderated ensuring that each file made available reaches quality standards, is tagged well and has great thumbnails so it is easy to find what you need.

Finding a great image online elicits a little thrill, but it can be tricky – if you’re looking for a pic to pop into a presentation or illustrate a Web page, you need to know if you’re allowed to use that photo, and how you can use it. Today, Yahoo! Image Search is launching a Creative Commons license filter that allows you to simply and quickly find images that are available for reuse.

When you use Yahoo! Image Search, you’ll now see a checkbox for Creative Commons allowing you to filter for images from Flickr that can be used commercially or that can be modified (remixed, tweaked, or built upon) with restrictions set by the image’s creator.

“What is a shapefile?” you may ask. Its a file containing shapes mathematically generated by the thousands of Flickr geotagged photos of particular neighborhoods, countries, and continents. The data can also be seen as reverse-engineered fuzzy maps created by user generated longitude and latitude coordinates that are then demarcated by Where-On-Earth IDs.

We want people (developers, researchers and anyone else who wants to play) to find new and interesting ways to use the shapefiles and we recognize that, in many cases, this means having access to the entire dataset.

We want people to feel both comfortable and confident using this data in their projects and so we opted for a public domain [waiver] so no one would have to spend their time wondering about the issue of licensing. We also think the work that the Creative Commons crew is doing is valuable and important and so we chose to release the shapefiles under the CC0 waiver as a show of support.

We want people to create their own shapefiles and to share them so that other people (including us!) can find interesting ways to use them. We’re pretty sure there’s something to this “shapefile stuff” even if we can’t always put our finger on it so if publishing the dataset will encourage others to do the same then we’re happy to do so.

We have just uploaded 300 of our best pictures from the Annual Meeting 2009 in Davos to the World Economic Forum’s Flickr account. Admittedly it took us some time to choose the best pictures from the thousands shot by our official photographers from Swiss-Image. My colleague Dafni Kokkidi spent the past week adding descriptions, tags and geo tags to all the photos. But it was well worth it, because these 300 high-resolution portrait shots are available for anyone to download in all sizes. Best of all, these pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons licence (BY-SA 3.0) meaning you can use them for free on your blog, on your website, in print and even for commercial purposes under the condition that you credit the World Economic Forum. We also uploaded the best pictures from our regional summits such as the recent World Economic Forum on Latin America in Rio.

Why would the White House then choose Attribution for their Flickr stream? Simple, unlike communities like Wikipedia and Thingiverse, Flickr doesn’t allow their photographers to choose Public Domain as an option to release their work to the world. So the Obama team must have picked the next best option: Attribution only.

Thank you to 20×200, designer Matt Jones, and everyone who supported CC by purchasing one of these special edition prints, released on April 7. We are proud to announce that the edition did extremely well: all 200 of the 8×10 prints sold out within a day, and the other sizes available at different prices were very popular as well. There are still prints remaining, and all proceeds will continue to benefit CC, so if you would like to show some support for CC, head over to the 20×200 site and secure one of these exhibition-quality prints for yourself (they’d also make great gifts!): size 11″x14″ for $50, 16″x20″ for $200, and 24″x30″ for $1,000.

We are delighted that Matt Jones has chosen Creative Commons to benefit from the sale of his special edition prints, and as always, we thank everyone who has supported CC over the years, allowing us to continue our work supporting artists, educators, scientists, and creators of all kinds all over the world.

As of April 14, 2009, we have used Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License to license our unique wallet designs allowing anyone to distribute, copy, or produce them as long as authorship credit is retained. The right to use our designs does include commercial use.

Since there are no ‘patents’ in regards to the fashion industry, we have decided to blow the lid off with our work by making it freely available to anyone. This also allows our designers to retain the rights to their work. When designers submit their work to us, we recommend that they first license it with Creative Commons to make sure their rights are protected.